You Herd Me!: I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will (26 page)

If you treat your Twitter account like an ad hoc ad for a
modeling agency, then trust me on this one: nobody cares what you say while you’re holding a microphone and standing on the sideline at a football game.

The NBA has expanded its first-round playoff series to seven games. Do you need seven games to come to the realization that LeBron and the Heat are better than Brandon Jennings and the Bucks? Apparently, eighty-two games wasn’t a big enough sample size.

The NFL is discussing a plan to expand to Europe. You know what, Roger Goodell? This isn’t a coffee chain. Lattes play everywhere, but American football doesn’t. Nobody in Jacksonville cares about the Jaguars; they’re going to be mesmerized by those same Jaguars in Dusseldorf?

In Major League Baseball, Tampa Bay—a talent-rich team with the most entertaining manager in the game—can’t draw despite playing in a star-studded division with the Yankees and the Red Sox.

What’s the problem in Tampa? If you tell me it’s because they need a new stadium, I just might come unglued. Stop with the New Stadium Argument. I’m tired of it. How did that work out for the baseball team—and the citizens—in Miami? That’s a fine empty stadium they’ve got there.

Arguing that a new stadium is going to fix your team is like arguing that a new house is going to save a failing marriage.

There’s some basic demographic realities at work here. Not every city in America has the geographic ability to be a port city. Similarly, not every city has the population, affluence, and Fortune 500 support to be a port for a major professional sports team.

Let’s get specific: the Tampa Bay Rays, one of those expansion franchises we didn’t need in the first place. All it would take is some rudimentary market analysis to tell you the Rays were going
to struggle despite being one of the better-run franchises in the sport.

Break it down: 20 percent of the population in the area is over 60 years old; Saint Petersburg has a median family income of $34,000, and 18 percent of the population is below the poverty line; Florida is our most transient state, and many if not most of its baseball fans claim teams from outside the region as their favorite.

Need more? The state of Florida has just sixteen Fortune 500 companies—Tampa has one (WellCare Health Plan), Saint Pete has one (Jabil Circuit). In a sport in which as many as 70 percent of the season tickets are purchased by corporations, that’s a big deal.

It’s not the stadium; it’s the demographics, stupid.

Baseball tried to make the argument that regular-season baseball would work because spring training always worked. Sorry—two different animals. It’s easier to get Marge and Hank into their Cadillac on a 75-degree spring day to pay $7 apiece to watch a spring training game when they can park and walk seven steps to the ticket office and eight more to their seats.

It’s quite a bit different to get some old boy to park his Delta 88 outside a big-league ballpark, where the cheapest tickets can be four times as much and it’s unbearably hot walking a half-mile from his car, another 100 yards to his seats, and 100 yards every time he has to get up and go to the bathroom or hit the concession stand.

In short, let’s stop treating sports leagues like Rite Aids and Walgreens. There are a finite number of shortstops—or power forwards—I’m willing to pay to see. Even Vin Scully, the greatest baseball broadcaster ever in many eyes, said on ESPN Radio a few years ago, “Baseball is not only filled with lots of Triple-A players, but right now some Triple-A teams.”

Vin is right. Unfortunately, fans don’t get to pay Triple-A prices.

Maybe I’m just out of touch.

Maybe it’s a futile argument.

Maybe we’re just addicted to
more
.

I’ve found that even when reasonable people make a reasonable argument regarding reducing
anything
, they’re treated to harsh criticism. When New York mayor Michael Bloomberg wanted to limit large sodas, he was lampooned in the New York press and met with outrage among a big percentage of the populace. He wasn’t asking people to limit the number of children they could have. He was just trying to limit their probability of getting teenage diabetes.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we live in the world of Big Gulps and the New Orleans Pelicans and more Triple-A players in Major League Baseball. But as comedian Dennis Miller once said, “Crap plus crap just equals more crap.”

One night during my days of living in the Pacific Northwest we had an unusual—and unusually fierce—ice storm. The next morning, I stumbled to the porch to grab the newspaper. It wasn’t there, so I expanded my search to the lawn.

No luck.

I was nearly out of hope when I spotted the paper: stuck in a boxwood hedge, one end pointing skyward, the rest of it in a death-grip freeze inside the hedge. Pulling it away was like yanking an ice-cream bar from the hands of my son.

Clearly, the kid who delivered my paper had a poor strikeout-to-walk ratio.

I still wanted to read the paper, so I went to the garage and grabbed some trimmers. I cut the paper from the bush and brought it inside, where I found that the delivery kid was also a lousy wrapper: some of the pages were iced together.

I canceled the paper that morning.

I didn’t cancel the paper because I suddenly got dumb or because it was too liberal or because I decided I no longer wanted to be informed about the world outside my house.

I ended my twenty-year relationship with the newspaper because it could no longer figure out how to deliver itself as quickly and smartly as other media. I was growing loyal to information in other forms, and that morning’s frozen paper was the tipping point. It was time for us to break up.

It wasn’t me; it was them.

My reaction to the errant delivery kid is a small example of a larger point. The media has changed dramatically, and I will say this without qualification: it has changed for the better.

Everything comes at us faster and from more voices and in different forms. Sometimes information even comes at us in 140 characters or less—and that’s OK. I’m tired of the bitching about the loss of the old media. The old media voices want us to believe that the new forms of information distribution are making us dumber and less curious.

They decry Short-Attention Span Nation, to which I say: Bullshit.

You want to go back to the good old days, go right ahead. I’m going to try to stay up with the new technology, because I’ve got news for you: the good old days sucked.

The national IQ is up 4 percent in the last decade, which puts a dent in the argument that we’re all getting stupid. If young people are so attention-deprived, why does every mind-blowing technological advance seem to come directly out of the mind of some 28-year-old in Silicon Valley?

You know what I like about the new media landscape? More voices from more places. Yes, I’m a long-time sports media guy with a national radio show and I said that: more voices make for a better media.

More blogs, more media outlets, more athletes with direct access to fans through Facebook and Twitter. I’m all for it. It doesn’t reduce my impact. If it means I have to work harder to get and keep your attention, so what? I don’t feel threatened by that. I’m willing to take on the challenge.

In the end, you win.

And if you want to counter by telling me there are too many idiots spouting on Twitter, I will agree with you and counter your counter with two words: avoid them.

There’s wheat. There’s chaff. Figure out the difference and move along.

See? It’s not that hard. We have choices, so make them. Ignore people whose opinions aren’t worth your time. You are a consumer in a media “store” the same way you are a consumer in a grocery store. If you don’t like broccoli, don’t put it in your cart. If you’re on a diet, avoid the donut aisle. If you don’t like crackpots on Twitter, avoid them.

Eventually, it will shake out the way business always does. The marketplace will decide the winners, and they won’t be the bottom-feeders. History tells us as much. Tabloid television had its run, but eventually consumers realized it didn’t stuff enough meat in the sandwich. Reality television will eventually have to up the ante, too—we won’t be amused by singing competitions and oddball river people for much longer.

You want to know what networks see as the next big battleground? Live sports programming. It’s dramatic, passionate, and authentic. It puts the
real
in reality television, and it’s winning.

If you’re one of those who sits back and grumbles about how much better the media was in the good old days—and it’s predominantly older journalists who feel this way—you’re siding with nostalgia based on mythology. How good were the good old days? Watch a Walter Cronkite newscast sometime. From limited video to unpolished production values to dull and wordy scripts, it’s not what you think it was. Yes, Cronkite was the broadcast journalism god of his time. He was wonderful in a crisis, but just try watching 97 percent of his newscasts.

I dare you.

It’s human nature to remember things more fondly after the fact. A University of Illinois professor once did a study on happiness in which he sent roughly a dozen participants on a Florida vacation. For the study, he called them several times a day and
asked them to rate their level of happiness from one (something close to a colonoscopy) to ten (ultimate bliss).

When the group returned, he asked them again how much fun they had and asked them to give corresponding “happiness numbers” to the exact times they had previously rated.

Almost without exception, he found that his participants gave much higher numbers after they had returned than they had during the vacation. In other words, they embellished their sense of pleasure as time passed.

Just like the media: folks, the good old days just weren’t that good.

Watch a football telecast and compare the information, graphics, camera angles, and production with those of even twenty years ago. Today’s work makes an old telecast feel like antique shopping.

Speed is paramount. Sports information is delivered with an urgency that allows the public a more transparent view of how the media works. It can be raw and unpolished, and sometimes it changes even as it’s being delivered.

Inevitably, this creates the potential for accuracy to be compromised, one of the leading charges of the old-guard media. We should wait until we have all the facts, they say, rather than running the risk of creating hysteria or damaging reputations with a rush to report.

And I agree—to a point. We should never rationalize or trivialize the importance of accuracy, but the urgent dissemination of critical information has become the top priority.

Would you rather wait to hear about your wife’s affair with the neighbor in full detail—with complete accuracy and background information and quotes from four neighbors—or would you prefer to get all the available information
right now
?

If someone leans over your cubicle and shouts, “Drew Brees just got traded to the Cardinals,” how deeply do you need the coverage to go? Do you need an intricately detailed account of salary-cap ramifications and conditional draft picks that will never affect either your fantasy team or your life?

No, you got pretty much all you needed from those eight words. That doesn’t mean you lack depth or intelligence; it just means you want the most important part of the story, and you want it
now
.

Besides, you can get all the intricate details tomorrow morning in the frozen paper.

Old-media types will tell you that people are less informed in a quick-hit culture. But can’t I argue that the fan who doesn’t need every detail of every trade might actually be a busier, more productive person with a broader life, a more vibrant career with real family responsibilities who doesn’t spend huge chunks of his life crafting lineups from his six fantasy league teams and racking up 17,682 message-board posts under the nickname Bodacious Bammer Benny?

Let me tell you a story. Several years ago ESPN held a contest to find the most knowledgeable sports fans in the country. After all the results were tabulated and the deciding was complete, they were rolled into my radio studio one day for an appearance on my show.

My God, you should have seen these people. They looked like a dozen guys who slept on the floor of a train station while the overnight custodial staff tossed them scraps of food. I asked if any of them were married. None were. In hindsight, it was pointless for me to even ask.

My point—without trying to be too mean—is this: the fans who seek
all
the information, the ones who live and die for the
history and the trivia and every Sunday’s list of NFL inactives, are not always the freshest bread in the bakery.

Those guys were the outliers, no doubt voracious consumers of the old media. But like any other business, the majority of consumers decide what’s important, and right now speed and pith rule the day.

Too many members of the media value their work more than consumers do. Who says your column or four-part series is vital? Interesting and important can be two separate things.